


A Man of His Time

by HotUtilitarian



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1700s, Blasphemy, Character Death, Demons, Ireland, Lawyers, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-22 06:33:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17657753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HotUtilitarian/pseuds/HotUtilitarian
Summary: An eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish rake has a brief encounter with a demon lover, that marks him for life.





	A Man of His Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Calycanthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calycanthe/gifts).



Christopher Jenico Foley, 2nd Baron Termonfeckin, was not a member of the Hellfire Club, the Blasters, the Holy Friars, the Gormogons, nor the Monks of Medmenham. He belonged, however, to White’s, the membership of which has undoubtedly wreaked a thousand thousand times more havoc upon the nations of the earth than that of all of those libertine associations combined. He was not a bad landlord, nor yet a very good one, paying fair wages, and asking middling rents, yet doing little to improve his estates, from which he was more often absent than not. He employed no outright scoundrels as his agents, but whether this circumstance stemmed from luck or judgement his neighbours and tenants were hard put to say. He honoured his debts and paid handsomely for his pleasures, which was only right, since he lived for them alone. If he had no religion, then he had also no superstitions, and believed in nothing that could not be demonstrated to the satisfaction of his capable but unexceptional intellect. When he entered that stage of life at which a nobleman should turn his mind to the begetting of a legitimate heir, he took upon himself the task of paying court to a Miss De Noyes, a pretty, accomplished lady of one-and-twenty summers and ten thousand a year, and after eight months of this labour achieved an understanding of their engagement with her ancient and blameless family, on the condition that the future Lady Termonfeckin should never be obliged actually to set her white and slender foot inside County Louth. To put into five words what the foregoing has expressed in a mere two hundred, he was a man of his time.

* * *

_They wait nowhere where there is nothing and it is endless always. Supplications, formal and feeble, rude and clamorous, sometimes strain, but do not break, the veil. Here is a wild creature in skins, here a woman sheeted in gold leaf, white linen and bulls’ blood, here a civil servant about to sit the metropolitan examination, here a doctor in his study at Wittenberg, here a cottar’s wife who has eaten bad bread. They don’t answer them, of course. It’s more like…imagine this. Every day they are permitted to throw two dozen pots of paint at the veil. On the day the random pigments coalesce into a perfect likeness of their person, they may pass. It’s not really like that, of course. There are no paints, or dozens, or days. Or throwing. Even the veil is not, not exactly. They wait in a state of agitation like that of a lover between declaration and the beloved’s response, of a defendant on a capital charge in the moment before the foreman of the jury speaks, of one surrendering to an armed assailant. Except it’s not really like any of those. It’s much worse. They soon learn that patience is no use, not in eternity. But since it is eternity, the moment eventually comes. They step forward, and pass through._

* * *

Kit was annoyed. These horrid little people were keeping him waiting. Waiting beside a fire in a comfortable chair with a cup of chocolate, a tray of comfits and half-a-dozen bound back issues of the _Spectator_ , but waiting nonetheless. Notaries did not keep noblemen waiting, it was out of all rational compass, what did he care if old Latymer had died suddenly the day before yesterday and the new man had to familiarise himself with your Lordship’s affairs in a hurry, all these many grants and annuities to your Lordship’s friends in St Anne’s and St James’s and _Covent Garden_ , upon the happy occasion of your Lordship’s marriage—it was damned insolence, that’s what it was, but to say so would be to admit the insinuation, which would not do. Especially since only one name of the list of beneficiaries was of gender feminine, and that Mrs Elizabeth Cocking, who had, when refused entry to the assembly rooms at Bath, returned incognito and _en travesti_ , and joined the promenade to general scandal.

The door opened, and the new man passed through.

‘My Lord,’ he said, making a leg. His smile drove all irritation from Kit’s mind, inflaming it instead. He was ravishing; Kit would not rest until he was ravished.

* * *

_They find the form most disagreeable. For one thing, it is quite tiny, a fathom deep and just over a third of that broad at the widest point. And they are so feeble when encased! Still many times stronger than an actual mortal—they will have to watch that, especially at first, but still, it is humiliating. They reflect, as many times before, how it is possible that these insubstantial, leaky vessels are the beings beloved of and cherished by the Adversary—it is insupportable! They would not exchange places with one of them, not even for a chance of return to favour—well, that's not exactly true. And something rubs off—there's just something—of course they cannot feel comfort, but there's certainly something, something about knowing that, at length, in a trice, it will all be over—_

* * *

 ‘My Lord, I cannot credit you honour me so, but I must be in court at the fashionable dinner hour.’

‘You are called to the bar? Why do you do this menial clerking, then?’

‘A poor devil only, my Lord; my devil-master pays me not, so I must notarize on the side for angel-nobles.’

‘How quaintly you talk. Call me Termonfeckin. No don’t, actually. Call me Kit. And if you will not dine with me, you must yet have supper.’

‘Termonfeckin. St. Feichin’s haven. Ghastly fellow, Feichin. Called down a plague because the High King wanted to control the population. Had the decency to die in it himself, but there really are some unaccountable coves on—that side, you know. And you Irishmen persist in making them saints.’

‘I wouldn’t say I was an—well, I’m no Englishman, if that’s the alternative, fate worse than death, eh what? Sorry, you know what I mean.’

‘Oh no, my Lord, I quite agree. I shall attend you at supper.’

* * *

_They've had carnal congress with many mortals. It is not so peculiar as the feeding and intoxication rituals that precede it (how the mortals love their dead animals and vegetable matter, their rotten plant juices of various kinds!) and does not usually last as long. It just seems to them, who is incapable of pleasure, rather redundant and tedious, but there's nothing like it to ensnare a soul. And yet there is certainly something—something about the structure of it, crescendo, climax, release, repeat—it is, again, knowing that, in the end, at length, in a trice, it will all be over._

* * *

Kit had never, in all his life before, seen anything so exquisite. He might have sat—or stood rather, with his spear in the serpent’s neck—for St Michael. They stood naked, toe to toe. Kit swept his hand down the young man’s side and flank: the skin was cool, but no gooseflesh rose on it. He looked into his tawny eyes, obliged, as a man not much above the middle size, to raise his own a fraction.

‘You’re six foot tall,’ Kit said. ‘Exactly.’

‘You have a good eye.’

‘My nurse said that Our Lord was the only man who ever lived to stand precisely six foot high. It’s a Papish superstition.’

‘No it isn’t.’

Stunned for a moment by the matter-of-fact tone, Kit broke into startled laughter. ’I’ve a certain reputation in the town, my dear, but I hadn’t banked on buggering Jesus.’

‘Then suck my cock. _Haec quotiescumque feceritis, in mei memoriam facietis_.’

Parodies of the Romish mass were quite usual at the private orgies where Kit had mostly been distracted and bored, but few caught the authentic, dangerous cadence of ceremony as his companion did now: he sounded not like a boastful fool making mock of an idolatrous rite, but as if he really meant blasphemy. Kit would wonder later, and for the many years of his life to come, if the mettle that fell upon his teeth and tongue were really as steely cold as it seemed, for it brought to mind another thing, that he had overheard of Bridget and not been told by her, that witches universally testified that the Devil’s nature was chill like icicles.

The young man recovered instantly from his crisis, and they dallied together many hours. Kit would never again know perfection of technique alike to it; this man never fumbled, not even in the deliberate, endearing ways that practised lovers do. And though the pleasure was keener than anything he could ever have imagined, it also had something of the quality of the pleasure a man gives himself. Not only was there no affection—Kit did not put any great store by affection, where fucking was concerned, affection one could have from a horse—there was no connexion of minds, of anything beyond their tongues in one another's mouths, his tongue in Kit's arse, his prick in Kit's arse (a very splendidly proportioned member it was, as if it had been made to caulk and render him shipshape) and so turn and turn about. He seemed barely to perspire, let alone to flag, so Kit was denied the satisfaction of seeing his bedmate sweaty, flushed and faint from his efforts, but that was unworthy gratification, to self-conceit only, not to the glorious, sublime and divine body, the only proper object of worship. Dawn came, and passed; the sun rose unignorably high.

‘You must go?’

‘Yes. Sessions begin at nine. I shall have to fly to get there on time.’

Moisture sprang to Kit’s lower eyelids, surprising more than it shamed him. ‘I won’t see you again, will I? I have to marry—I have to, poor Harriet—’

The tears burst, and the lawyer wiped them away with his thumbs, then sucked on the salt with a wild lascivious grimace.

* * *

_They—appreciate him, more than they have ever appreciated a mortal. He has made them a rare gift: a minute intimation of the precious knowledge that in the end, in a trice, at length, it will all be over. He has given them time. So, sentimental devil that they are, they do not take proper possession. Instead they give him these three things, in return for his time: long life, a demise—insofar as it can be—painless, and the assurance that the heirs of his body male should share in this kindly fashion of death. As for the remainder of their corporeal term, they use it in ambition, policy and intrigue, to become the Junior Counsel to the Treasury, in legal argot known as the Treasury Devil, and there faithfully serve their Master, without resort to lubricity._

* * *

Extract from John Quainte's _Genealogical History of the Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited and Extinct Peerages of the British Isles_ (1866):

**FOLEY—In the peerage of Ireland, Baron Termonfeckin **

** by letters patent, dated 14th July 1717 **

** Lineage **

THOMAS FOLEY, a distinguished architect of the City of Dublin, who with singular humility styles himself ‘Bricklayer’ in his Will, dated April 1663, left by Mary, his wife, a son,

SIR CHARLES FOLEY Knt., an opulent merchant of the city of Dublin, who was Lord Mayor of that city in 1687, and was knighted. Sir Charles began the house at Termonfeckin in the county of Louth, called Foleys Court or Follyscourt, _m_. Elizabeth Tipping, daughter of Thomas Tipping Esq., of Castletown, by whom he had 3 surviving daughters […] and one son, his successor,

THOMAS, M.P. for the Co. Louth, who was elevated to the peerage of Ireland, 14th July 1717, in the dignity of Baron FOLEY of Termonfeckin. His Lordship _m._ in 1690 Mary, _dau._ of Robert Fitzgerald, 2nd Earl of Kildare, by whom ( _d._ in 1707) he had issue,

> CHARLES, who _d. unm_., 1718.
> 
> FRANCES, _m._ 1711 the Rt. Hon. Sir William Blaine, Bart., and had one son only, who _d._ young.

His Lordship m. in 1715, Elinor, relict of Henry Westenra, Esq. of Dublin, by whom he had one son, his successor, 

CHRISTOPHER JENICO, 2nd Baron, _b._ 1719, _s._ 1726,  _m._ in 1747 Henrietta, _dau._ ofSir Robert de Noyes, Bart., of Devonshire, and by whom (who _d._ September 1797) he had issue,

> HENRIETTA, _d. unm._ 1752.
> 
> FRANCES, _d. unm._ 1761.
> 
> CHRISTOPHER, _m._ in 1781 Anne Woods, dau. of Sir John Woods, Knt., of Northampton, accidentally drowned while fishing in the River Blackwater at Fermoy, _d._ July 1797, leaving only _daus_.
> 
> ROBERT, drowned in embarking from England to India, _d.unm_. 1780.
> 
> HENRY, being bred to the sea-service, 2nd. Lt. of _Superb_ , _d. unm_. 1783 when she sank with all hands off Bombay.

His Lordship the 2nd Baron drowned in his passage from Ireland to England, after surveying the damage done to his properties and land in the late insurgency, _d._ November 1798, whereupon the honour became EXTINCT.

**Author's Note:**

> 'Hellfire Club, the Blasters, the Holy Friars, the Gormogons, nor the Monks of Medmenham': libertine clubs of the 18th century in England and Ireland.
> 
> 'A poor devil only, my Lord; my devil-master pays me not..': a barrister's pupil was known as a 'devil'; they sometimes worked without fees for the period of their pupillage.
> 
> ' _Haec quotiescumque feceritis, in mei memoriam facietis_ ': 'As often as you do these things, you do them in remembrance of me,' part of the Words of Consecration in the Tridentine Mass.


End file.
